I wanted my own website early on from my youth. Despite always being into computers, I never saw myself working in technology, even before I saw myself working in music (which is, funnily enough, the exact inverse of a lot of stereotypical ‘band kids’ I feel). In elementary, I remember going nuts on FreeWebs with my friends, and in Boy Scouts, one of many things I did poorly was a brief stint as our troop’s webmaster.

When I got done with college, I figured what I wanted was a personal base from which to share things with and for other music educators. After a lot of agonizing over a domain that wouldn’t be my first choice, I eventually bought a few, and decided this one would be my permanent home. And after feeling like I just needed to start, I chose to do a WordPress.com blog over SquareSpace because it would work with MarsEdit. I thought about looking into more options down the road beyond that, but I just got to blogging.

I don’t post as often as I’d like on this blog, but it’s not for lack of inspiration – I have a project for this blog in OmniFocus, and it has lots of article ideas. Beyond that project, there’s mostly-written articles in Drafts and iA Writer – I can think of three quite long articles that I’ve had on the back-burner for awhile without even looking.

No, the biggest roadblock to posting on here is that I feel the need to be more thorough than anyone would deem necessary. If brevity really is the soul of wit, then I’m a dullard. As a result, it takes a lot of time to actually write a post.¹

If I were a lot less busy, I’d finish a lot more posts (and a lot more projects of every sort.). I’ve been doing some surfing of different independent blogs (beyond my regular reads in RSS) and have been regrowing my appreciation for the art of blogging. I was encouraged to write this by Matt Mullenweg’s own post (for those that don’t know, he founded WordPress, and is one of the biggest tech people who doesn’t actually suck; very cool guy instead).

For the last several years, I’ve seen increased dissatisfaction with a lot of different social media sites. From biases in algorithms, to moderation decisions (or lack thereof), surveillance, adtech… there’s a lot of reasons people have been upset, and with good reason. While one’s blog sits as a separate island (enough that I, like most people with a blog, will share links to my posts on my social media accounts), it has a huge value – at the end of the day, you own your own blog. Even with a paid service instead of self-hosting, you can just get up and leave. I’m actually thinking about ditching WordPress entirely for a different kind of site, so I exported everything and converted it all into Markdown files that I could move to a new site if I wanted to.²

If you’re interested in starting a blog, there’s lots of options, some easy, some not. Some include:

• Start a WordPress.com blog, which can be free for their most basic features
• micro.blog for cheap (awesome in that it exists in this space between being a full blog, and being a short form posting site like Twitter – somehow the best of both worlds, and works with ActivityPub services like Mastodon)
• Bear Blog for free (I believe)
• Neocities for free or low cost
• A jillion other very affordable and easy-to-use options out there like Blot.
• On the more complicated side (and what I’ve been looking at) rolling up a static site generator, and probably using a Jamstack service which generally provide free hosting good enough for any personal blog.
• Also more complicated: hosting your own CMS like WordPress (sometimes called WordPress.org) through a hosting provider.

It’s just cool to have your own space on the World Wide Web. I see a lot of people coming up with so many solutions that they don’t really own, and it’s nicer to be the master of your own domain.³ You don’t have to have the perfect solution to get started, because it’s so easy to migrate what you’re doing after the fact (though more of modern technology seems to be training us to not expect that – the ‘indie web’ is resilient specifically because of that.